The Khmer Rouge and the Pol Pot Era

We were back in Phnom Penh for New Year’s Eve, and celebrated a friend’s 70 th birthday in full style, with a delicious carrot birthday cake, baked in a rice cooker by another AJWS volunteer. We recommend that everyone try this experiment.

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New Year’s day saw us visiting the notorious Killing Field of Choeung Ek, outside Phnom Penh. Our visit made us realize how difficult it is for the human mind to deal with tragedies on this scale, and how hard it is to represent them adequately to future generations. The Jewish people have done a wonderful job of this at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, as well as with memorials in other cities, honouring and remembering people as individuals, while reminding people of the vigilance needed to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

In Cambodia, during the Khmer Rouge era ('75-'79), about 2 million people died, out of a population of under 8 million. A lot starved to death or died of disease, but many were killed, and their bodies (live or dead) dumped in mass graves. Choeung Ek is the symbol of these Killing Fields, but it is only one of hundreds of similar sites, now unmarked.

If you wonder how people can kill and betray their own family and colleagues, you have only to realize that many of the killers and jailers were 13/14 years old, were brainwashed into compliance, and painfully tortured to death as examples, if they showed any sign of resisting what they were supposed to do – one of the graves was found to be full of headless young soldiers who had been painfully flayed to death. In another location we saw a tree where babies were killed by smashing their heads into the trunk.

Despite the horrors, Choeung Ek does not seem to capture the emotions in the same way as the Holocaust memorials. The piles of skulls and clothing, the still buried bodies, and the teeth and bits of bone which surface after every rain, don’t seem to be enough, without the individual stories. It is only 30 years ago, but it seems like another world, and the abundance of butterflies somehow seems to give the place a sense of peace, which may be no bad thing.

[If you’d like to learn a bit more background about Choeung Ek and S21, the school in Phnom Penh that became a jail for over 20,000 people, visit this website.]